10 questions for a founder : Stupeflix

With all the talks about video becoming the number media on the internet, little is said about how much more complex it is than text or photos. The elements of motion and sound, as well as timing , file size or even rendering, have made mass market adoption slow, outside of live broadcasts. Stupeflix has already 3 apps on the market which have greatly simplified the process, including Replay an automated editing app. We sat down to talk with Nicola Steegman, founder of Stupeflix, after the company was recently acquired by GoPro and just weeks ahead of his presentation at the LDV Vision Summit.

– A little about you, what is your background ?

I’m an engineer from Ecole Centrale Paris, worked at a search engine company in France called Exalead as a product manager, then started Stupeflix.

– You recently sold your startup  Stupeflix to GoPro. Can you explain what is Stupeflix?

Stupeflix is first and foremost a silly name for a startup, but beyond that, my co-founder Francois Lagunas and I started Stupeflix with the vision that video was now easy to host and stream (Youtube was already there), but hard to edit or create.

So we started with video editing: our iOS app Replay focuses on producing extremely sophisticated and polished montages, paced to the music, in just one tap and in just a few seconds. Replay was named App of the Year by Apple in 2014 in 34 countries. We offer the whole Replay experience to developers as a web API.

We also developed a camera app that stabilizes as you shoot, called Steady, which is quite unique on the App Store.

And then we have Legend, a mobile app to create short videos of text animations, which was one of the launch partners of the Facebook Messenger App Platform last year.

– What did GoPro see in Stupeflix that they had to acquire it?

Editing video is such a long and tedious process, the only way out of this seems to be to automate the editing process entirely, while also letting you tinker with the output. Replay does it better than any other app I believe, and it does it very quickly. It’s an obvious match for GoPro users with so much footage on their hands and so little time.

–  Tell us about the under the hood breakthrough you had to make in order for Stupeflix/Replay to succeed ?

Replay is unique in that everything happens almost instantly on the device, which is only possible because we developed our own rendering engine working locally on the device, which is quite similar to a 3D game engine.

For Legend, we developed our own text rendering engine.

– What is your role at GoPro today ? Do you continue to develop Replay?

I continue to work on Replay with my team. There are many cool features that we’re developing, tailored to GoPro content or to enhance the editing automation.

– First Kolor then you, do you think GoPro has a thing for French tech or is French tech just that good?

It might be that French engineers are particularly good at computer vision, data processing etc… because our engineering schools have always favored those fields.

 – What excites you in the visual tech space today ?

Visual tech being used both to swap faces on Snapchat and to drive a car makes you think it’s finally become useful. VR is a new life experience, the kind you rarely encounter.

 – What do you expect from LDV Vision Summit and why ?

With so many brilliant vision tech folks gathered in the space, I might stumble upon one or two other life changing demos.

– What would you like to see GoPro create that technology cannot yet deliver ?

A drone that would be truly usable for consumers. Affordable 3D 360 cameras.

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As in previous years, Kaptur is a proud media sponsor of the LDV Vision Summit. On top of advance previews of speakers and panels, we offer our readers 25% discount pricing.  Act fast, there are only 10 tickets available.

Go to: www.ldv.co/visionsummit/2016/tickets , enter KAPTUR25

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Photo by striatic